Tag Archives: SaaS

Cloud computing has come of age and is the solution of choice for CIOs looking to maximize use of resources while minimizing capital spend.[1] Cloud solutions, whether it is infrastructure, platform or service, have the appeal of business agility[2], without having to understand what is “under the hood”. However, what’s under the hood becomes even more important in a Cloud environment because there can be multiple services running with potential impact on numerous customers and the services provided to them. For software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) the hosting operating system is a critical component included in with Cloud environment as it directly impacts the performance of the Cloud solution. For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) the operating system is a critical choice made by the customer.

The CIO View

The CIO loves the idea of having the ability to rapidly provide on-demand ubiquitous computing resources to their company without the management overhead and integration challenges. The hardware infrastructure, network infrastructure, storage, hypervisor and OS must have high availability, scalability, and performance to meet the “5-nines” reliability expected (SCIT Report) with the operating system being especially critical component in that stack.[3]

UNIX, A Robust Platform for Cloud:

The Cloud needs to be highly available, scalable, secure, and robust for high-demand computing. A certified UNIX® OS can provide this and enables companies to innovate in the Cloud. A CIO would be looking at each element of the stack with a high degree of assurance that the Cloud solution has been well tested and has proven system and application interoperability, which also simplifies solution integration. The UNIX OS amplifies this simplicity delivering peace of mind for IT directors and above.

Who Is Choosing a UNIX Cloud?

Cloud Solution/Hosting Providers look to a UNIX Cloud infrastructure to service financial institutions looking to support high transactional environments like online and mobile banking marketplace.[4] Moreover, UNIX Cloud infrastructure provides a cost-effective, secure, and redundant environment.[5]

HPE, IBM, and Oracle have expanded their services offerings to deliver UNIX mission-critical cloud and enterprise infrastructure, including their branded systems. These UNIX Cloud solutions help their customers continue to scale while delivering business continuity and a low total cost of ownership.[7]

Get more tools and resources on UNIX innovation on www.opengroup.org/UNIX or review these other resources today:

Cloud Computing standards, like other standards go through a series of evolutionary phases similar to the ones I outlined in the Top 5 phases of IaaS standards evolution. IaaS standards, in particular, take longer than their SaaS and PaaS counterparts because a balance is required between the service-orientation of the core infrastructure components in Cloud Computing.

As one of the co-chairs of this project, here is some insight into the manner in which The Open Group went about creating the definition of this standard:

Step One: Identify the key characteristics of service orientation, as well as those for the cloud as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Analyze these characteristics and the resulting synergies through the application of service orientation in the cloud. Compare and contrast their evolution from the traditional environment through service orientation to the Cloud.

Step Two: Identify the key architectural building blocks that enable the Operational Systems Layer of the SOA Reference Architecture and the Cloud Reference Architecture that is in progress.

Step Three: Map these building blocks across the architectural layers while representing the multi-faceted perspectives of various viewpoints including those of the consumer, provider and developer.

Step Four: DefineaMotor Cars in the Cloudbusinessscenario: You, the consumer are downloading auto-racing videos through an environment managed by a Service Integrator which requires the use of services for software, platform and infrastructure along with traditional technologies. Provide a behind-the-curtains perspective on the business scenario where the SOCCI building blocks slowly but steadily come to life.

Step Five: Identify the key connection points with the other Open Group projects in the areas of architecture, business use cases, governance and security.

The real test of a standard is in its breadth of adoption. This standard can be used in multiple ways by the industry at large in order to ensure that the architectural nuances are comprehensively addressed. It could be used to map existing Cloud-based deployments to a standard architectural template. It can also serve as an excellent set of Cloud-based building blocks that can be used to build out a new architecture.

Have you taken a look at this standard? If not, please do so. If so, where and how do you think this standard could be adopted? Are there ways that the standard can be improved in future releases to make it better suited for broader adoption? Please let me know your thoughts.

HP Distinguished Technologist, E.G.Nadhan has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry across the complete spectrum of selling, delivering and managing enterprise level solutions for HP customers. He is the founding co-chair for The Open Group SOCCI project and is also the founding co-chair for the Open Group Cloud Computing Governance project.

The following is the transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion on certification and its impact on the professionalization of IT and skills management, in conjunction with the The Open Group Conference, Austin 2011.

There are now a lot of shifts in skills and a lot of movement about how organizations should properly staff themselves. There have been cost pressures and certification issues for regulation and the adoption of new technologies. We’re going to look at how all these are impacting the role of certification out in the field. Here to help us better understand how an organization like The Open Group is alleviating the impact and importance of IT skills and role certification amid this churning change in the IT organizations is Steve Philp. He is the Marketing Director for Professional Certification at The Open Group. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Philp: Thank you.

Gardner: We are also here with Andrew Josey. He is Director of Standards at The Open Group. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Josey: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we’re here with James de Raeve. He is Vice President of Certification at The Open Group. Hello, James.

James de Raeve: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Let’s start with you. As I said, we’re seeing a lot of change about many things in IT, but certainly how to properly staff, especially as you start to consider outsourcing options and Cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) types of options. Organizations are also looking at consolidation around their applications and infrastructure. So there’s quite a bit of change. Naturally, the people in the “people, processes, and technology” spectrum need to be addressed. From your perspective, why is there the need for more professionalization, or what are the trends that are driving the need to reexamine your staff and how to properly certify your IT leadership?

de Raeve: The primary driver here that we’re hearing from members and customers is that they need to get more out of the investments that they’re making — their payroll for their IT staff. They need to get more productivity. And that has a number of consequences.

Realizing talent

They want to ensure that the people they are employing and that they’re staffing their teams with are effective. They want to be sure that they’re not bringing in external experts when they don’t need to. So there is a need to realize the talent that they’ve actually got in their internal IT community and to develop that talent, nurture it, and exploit it for the benefit of the organization.

And professionalism, professionalization, and profession frameworks are all tools that can be used in identifying, measuring, and developing the talents and capabilities of your people. That seems to be the major driver.

Gardner: Steve, any further thoughts on the trends that are driving certification and professionalization issues?

Philp: Something I have noticed since joining The Open Group is that we’ve got some skills and experience-based certifications. They seem to be the things that people are particularly interested in, because it’s not just a test of your knowledge about a particular vendor or product, but how you have applied your skills and experience out there in the marketplace. They have proven to be very successful in helping people assess where they are and in working towards developing a career path. That’s one of the areas of certification that things are going to move more towards — more skills and experience-based certification programs in organizations.

Gardner: Where are we seeing this most in demand? Are there particular types of technology certification or professional role certification that are in the most demand? Where is this the most hot or impactful right now?

Philp: Looking at certification in general, you still have areas like Microsoft MCSE, Microsoft technical specialist, application development, and project management that are in demand, and things like CCNA from Cisco. But I’ve also noticed a lot more in the security field. CISSP and CCSA seem to be the ones that are always getting a lot of attention. In terms of security, the trends in mobile computing, cloud computing, means that security certification is a big growth area.

We’re just about to put a security track into our Certified IT Specialist Program at The Open Group, so there will be a skills and experience-based track for security practitioners soon.

Gardner: James, of course we should point out for our listeners that we’re not just talking about certification from vendors and suppliers about the specific products and/or platforms, but we’re really looking at a skill- and roles-based approach. Maybe you could help us distinguish between the two and why it’s important to do so?

de Raeve: The difference, as Steve alluded to, is that there is a whole world out there of technology and product-related certifications that are fulfilling a very important function in helping people establish and demonstrate their knowledge of those particular products and technologies.

But there is a need for people too in the building of teams and in the delivering of results to nurture and grow their people to be team players and team participants and to be able to work with them to function within the organization as, for want of a better term, “t-shaped people,” where there are a number of soft and people-related skills and potentially architecture related skills for the IT specialists, and skills and capabilities enable people to be rounded professionals within an organization.

T-shaped people

It’s that aspect that differentiates the professionalization and the profession-oriented certification programs that we’re operating here at The Open Group — The Open Certified Architect, The Open Certified IT Specialist. Those are t-shaped people and we think that makes a huge difference. It’s what’s going to enable organizations to be more effective by developing their people to have that more rounded t-shaped capability.

Gardner: Andrew, with the emphasis on standards and your role there, how does the impact of certification on the ability to adhere to and exploit standards come together? What’s the relationship between making sure you have standardization around your people and their skill sets, but also being able to exploit standardization and even more automation across your organization?

Josey: We see the certification as being the ultimate drive in the uptake of the standards, and so we’re able to go from not just having a standard on the shelf to actually seeing it being deployed in the field and used. We’ve actually got some people certification programs, such as TOGAF®, and we’ve got some over 20,000 practitioners now.

We’ve gone through the certification program and we’ve been using and evangelizing, TOGAF as a standard in the field and then feeding that back to our members and, through the association, the feedback improvements to the standards. So it’s very much part of the end-to-end ecosystem — developing a standard for deploying it, and getting people on it, and then getting the feedback in the right way.

Gardner: I suppose that as organizations want to create a level playing field, we’re starting to see calls for this type of certification in requests for proposal (RFPs) around projects. For folks on the buy side who are seeking either people or the suppliers themselves, a supply chain and ecosystem of providers, how much is certification playing a role and how they can pick and choose among each other with some sense of trust and reliability?

Philp: It’s very much an important part of the process now. TOGAF and IT Architect Certification (ITAC) have appeared in a number of RFPs for government and for major manufacturing organizations. So it’s important that the suppliers and the buyers recognize these programs.

Similarly with recruitment, you find that things like TOGAF will appear in most recruitment ads for architects. Certainly, people want knowledge of it, but more and more you’ll see TOGAF certification is required as well.

ITAC, which is now Open CA, has also appeared in a number of recruitment ads for members like Logica, Capgemini, Shell. More recently, organizations like the CBS, EADS, ADGA Group, Direct Energy have requested it. And the list goes on. It’s a measure of how important the awareness is for these certifications and that’s something we will continue to drive at The Open Group.

Gardner: All right, Steve, thanks for that. As you mentioned, there have been some changes in terms of the branding around some of these. Let’s take a quick review if we could around what’s being happening at the Austin Conference, but also what’s new and what’s been going on with the branding. Let’s look at the TOGAF, ArchiMate®, and business architecture certifications. What’s new and interesting there?

In development

Josey: I am speaking up on what we are doing in ArchiMate first, before I talk about TOGAF, and then Steve will tell us what the Business Forum is up to.

ArchiMate certification is something new that we’re developing right now. We haven’t deployed a certification program as yet. The previous certification program was under the ArchiMate Foundation, which was the body that developed ArchiMate, before it transferred into The Open Group.

We’re currently working on the new program which will be similar to some aspects of our TOGAF program, and it’ll be knowledge base certification with an assessment by exam and a practical assessment in which the candidate can actually do modeling. So this will be people certification and there will also be accredited training course certification.

And then also what we’re going to do there is actually to provide certification for tools. There will be certifications there.

That’s pretty much what we’re doing in ArchiMate, so we don’t have a firm timeline. So it will not be available it looks like, probably towards the end of the year would be the earliest, but possibly early next year.

Gardner: Knowing that we reach a wide audience, could you give a quick overview of what ArchiMate is for those who might not be familiar.

Josey: ArchiMate is a modeling language for enterprise architecture (EA) in general and specifically it’s a good fit for TOGAF. It’s a way of communicating and developing models for TOGAF EA. Originally it was developed by the Telematica Instituut and funded, I think, by the EU and a number of commercial companies in the Netherlands. It was actually brought into The Open Group in 2008 by the ArchiMate Foundation and is now managed by the ArchiMate Forum within The Open Group.

Gardner: Now we’re going to hear an update on TOGAF.

Josey: The latest version of TOGAF is TOGAF 9 for certification. As we mentioned earlier, there are two types of certification programs, skills and knowledge based. TOGAF falls into the knowledge based camp. We have two levels. TOGAF 9 Foundation, which is our level one, is for individuals to assess that they know the terminology and basic concepts of EA in TOGAF.

Level two, which is a superset of level one, in addition assesses analysis and comprehension. The idea is that some people who are interested in just getting familiar with TOGAF and those people who work around enterprise architects can go into TOGAF Foundation. And these enterprise architects themselves should initially start with the TOGAF Certified, the level two, and then perhaps move on later to Open CA. That will be helpful.

For TOGAF 9 Certification, we introduced that by midyear 2009. We launched TOGAF 9 in February, and it took a couple of months to just roll out all these certifications through all the exam channels. Since then, we’ve gone through 8,000 certifications (see June blog post). We’ve seen that two-thirds of those were at the higher level, level two, for EA practitioners and one-third of those are currently at the foundation level.

Gardner: And lastly, business architecture?

A new area

Philp: Business architecture is a new area that we’ve been working on. Let me just to go back to what we did on the branding, because it ties in with that. We launched The Open Group’s new website recently and we used that as the opportunity to re-brand ITAC as The Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA) program. The IT Specialist Certification (ITSC) has now become The Open Group Certified IT Specialist or Open CITS Program.

We did the rebranding at that time, because we wanted to be it associated with the word “open.” We wanted to give the skills and experience-based certification a closer linkage to The Open Group. That’s why we changed from ITAC to Open CA. But, we’ve not changed the actual program itself. Candidates still have to create a certification package and be interviewed by three board members, and there are still three levels of certification: Certified, Master, and Distinguished.

However, what we’re intending to do is have some core requirements that architects need to meet, and then add some specific specializations for different types of architects. The one that we’ve been working on the most recently is the Business Architecture Certification. This came about from an initiative about 18 months ago.

We formed something called the Business Forum with a number of Platinum Members who got involved with it –companies like IBM, HP, SAP, Oracle and Capgemini. We’ve been defining the conformance requirements for the business architecture certification. It’s going through the development process and hopefully will be launched sometime later this year or early next year.

Gardner: I’m interested in how this is making a difference in the field. There’s a lot of change going on this consolidation. There’s re-factoring of what’s core and what’s context in what IT department should focus on and, therefore, what their skill sets need to be. They’re adopting new technologies. I wonder if you have any examples of where we’ve seen certification come to play when an organization is looking to change its workforce. Any thoughts about some organizations and what the impact has been?

de Raeve: There’s a very good example of an organization that had exactly that problem, and they’ve done a presentation about this in one of our conferences. It’s Philips, and they used to have an IT workforce that was divided among the business units. The different businesses had their own IT function.

They changed that and went to a single IT function across the organization, providing services to the businesses. In doing so, they needed to rationalize things like grades, titles, job descriptions, and they were looking around for a framework within which they could do this and they evaluated a number of them.

They were working with a partner who wass helping them do this. The partner was an Open Group member and suggested they look at The Open Group’s IT Specialist Certification, the CITS Certification Program, as it provides a set of definitions for the capabilities and skills required for IT professionals. They picked it up and used it, because it covered the areas they were interested in.

This was sufficient and complete enough to be useful to them, and it was vendor-neutral, and an industry best practice. So they could pick this up and use it with confidence. And that has been very successful. They initially benchmarked their entire 900 strong IT workforce against The Open Group definition, so they could get to calibrate themselves, where their people were on their journey through development as professionals.

They’ve started to embrace the certification programs as a method of not only measuring their people, but also rewarding them. It’s had a very significant impact in terms of not only enabling them to get a handle upon their people, but also in terms of their employee engagement. In the engagement surveys that they do with their staff, some of the comments they got back after they started doing this process were, “For the first time we feel like management is paying attention to us.”

It was very positive feedback, and the net result is that they are well on their way to meeting their goal of no longer having automatically to bring in an external service provider whenever they were dealing with a new project or a new topic. They know that they’ve got people with sufficient expertise in-house on their own payroll now. They’ve been able to recognize that capability, and the use of it has had a very positive effect. So it’s a very strong good story.

I think that the slides will be available to our members in the conference’s proceedings from the London Conference in April. That will be worth something to look at.

Gardner: Where would you go for more information, if you were a practitioner, a budding enterprise architect and you wanted to certify yourself and/or if you were in an organization trying to determine more precisely what certification would mean to you as you’re trying to reengineer, modernize and right-size your organization? Where do you go for more information?

Philp: If you go to The Open Group website, http://www.opengroup.org/certifications, all of the people-based certifications are there, along with the benefits for individuals, benefits for organizations and various links to the appropriate literature. There’s also a lot of other useful things, like self-assessment tests, previous webinars, sample packages, etc. That will give you more of an idea of what’s required for certification along with the conformance requirements and other program documentation. There’s a lot of useful information on the website.

Gardner: Very good. We’ve been discussing how the role and impact of IT Certification is growing and some of the reasons for that. We’ve also looked at how organizations like The Open Group are elevating the role of certification and providing means to attain it and measure it the standard.

I’d like to thank our guests for delivering this sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, the week of July 18, 2011 We’ve been joined by our panel, Steve Philp, he is the Marketing Director for Professional Certification at the Open Group. Thank you, Steve.

Philp: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we are also have been joined by by Andrew Josey, Director of Standards at The Open Group. Thank you, Andrew.

Josey: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, James de Raeve, he is the Vice President of Certification, once again at The Open Group. Thanks James.

de Raeve: Thank you, Dana, and thanks to everyone who has listened.

Gardner: Right. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Recently I came across an interesting announcement by an SaaS vendor NetSuite on two-tier ERP and an analyst’s observations on the same. The analyst mentioned that the industry is moving in cycles from multiple-ERP suites across the company locations, then flattening those differences by having a single corporate standard ERP and again multiple-ERP stack with the advent of SaaS options.

The crux of this phenomenon is how we manage the technology selection across a globally distributed organization with diversified complexities. I see it as an interesting challenge for the Enterprise Architecture practice to solve.

Enterprise Architecture, when governed from global/corporate headquarters of a company, needs to balance the needs of the global and local entities. Often, the needs are conflicting and it requires lots of experience and courage to balance the needs of both. The local needs of the Architecture are most often triggered by various factors such as:

Cost – Need to have a cost-effective solution at an emerging region

Size – Need to have a lightweight solution rather than a heavyweight (ERP)

Regulatory/Compliance Requirements – Need to comply with local laws

Business Processes – Need to accommodate business process variations or cater to different customer segments

In the event of choosing a local solution that is not a corporate standard, there is a need to govern those architecture exceptions including integration of two different solutions for a cohesive management. The two-tier ERP mentioned above is a typical example of this scenario.

If we visualize Enterprise Architecture as a series of layers – Business/Information/Technology/Application Architectures – the verticals/segments across those layers would define the organizational units/locations (Local Specific or Organizational Unit specific Enterprise Architectures).

The location verticals, when influenced by the above factors, could lead to new technology selections such as Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service. While this practice can improve the autonomy at the local level, if unmanaged, it could soon lead to sphegetti architectures. The most important side-effect of localized adoption of cloud computing or mobile would lead to increased fragmentation (of data/process/technology). And that would defeat the purpose of Enterprise Architecture.

In another constructive scenario, if these standalone solutions need to exchange information with corporate information systems, again EA has a role to play by arbitrating the integration by the use of standards and guidelines.

As Serge Thorn articulated few weeks ago in The Open Group blog, it’s time to review our EA practices and make amendments to the core frameworks and processes to face the challenges emerging from technology mega trends (Cloud/Mobile) and evolving business models (emerging markets).

Balasubramanian Somasundaram is an Enterprise Architect with Honeywell Technology Solutions Ltd, Bangalore, a division of Honeywell Inc, USA. Bala has been with Honeywell Technology Solutions for the past five years and contributed in several technology roles. His current responsibilities include Architecture/Technology Planning and Governance, Solution Architecture Definition for business-critical programs, and Technical oversight/Review for programs delivered from Honeywell IT India center. With more than 12 years of experience in the IT services industry, Bala has worked with variety of technologies with a focus on IT architecture practice. His current interests include Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Computing and Mobile Applications. He periodically writes about emerging technology trends that impact the Enterprise IT space on his blog. Bala holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from MKU University, India.

The Oregon facility announced to the world press in April 2011 is 150,000 sq. ft., a $200 million investment. At any one time, the total of Facebook’s 500-million user capacity could be hosted in this one site. Another Facebook data center facility is scheduled to open in 2012 in North Carolina. There may possibly be future data centers in Europe or elsewhere if required by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company

The Oregon data center enables Facebook to reduce its energy consumption per unit of computing power by 38%

The data center has a PUE of 1.07, well below the EPA-defined state-of-the-art industry average of 1.5. This means 93% of the energy from the grid makes it into every Open Compute Server.

New second-level “evaporative cooling system”, a multi-layer method of transforming room temperature and air filtration

Launch of the “Open Compute Project” to share the data center design as Open Source. The aim is to encourage collaboration of data center design to improve overall energy consumption and environmental impact. Other observers also see this as a way of reducing component sourcing costs further, as most of the designs are low-cost commodity hardware

The servers are 38% more efficient and 24% lower cost

While this can be simply described as a major Cloud services company seeing their data centers as commodity and non-core to their services business, this perhaps is something of a more significant shift in the Cloud Computing industry in general.

Facebook making its data centers specifications open source demonstrates that IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) utility computing is now seen as a commodity and non-differentiating to companies like Facebook and anyone else who wants cheap compute resources.

What becomes essential is the efficiencies of operation that result in provisioning and delivery of these services are now the key differentiator.

Furthermore, it can be seen that it’s a trend towards what you do with the IaaS storage and compute. How we architect solutions that develop software as a service (SaaS) capabilities becomes the essential differentiator. It is how business models and consumers can maximize these benefits, which increases the importance of architecture and solutions for Cloud. This is key for The Open Group’s vision of “Boundaryless Information Flow™”. It’s how Cloud architecture services are architected, and how architects who design effective Cloud services that use these commodity Cloud resources and capabilities make the difference. Open standards and interoperability are critical to the success of this. How solutions and services are developed to build private, public or hybrid Clouds are the new differentiation. This does not ignore the fact that world-class data centers and infrastructure services are vital of course, but it’s now the way they are used to create value that becomes the debate.

Mark Skilton, Director, Capgemini, is the Co-Chair of The Open GroupCloud Computing Work Group. He has been involved in advising clients and developing of strategic portfolio services in Cloud Computing and business transformation. His recent contributions include the publication of Return on Investment models on Cloud Computing widely syndicated that achieved 50,000 hits on CIO.com and in the British Computer Society 2010 Annual Review. His current activities include development of a new Cloud Computing Model standards and best practices on the subject of Cloud Computing impact on Outsourcing and Off-shoring models and contributed to the second edition of the Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Off-shoring published through his involvement with Warwick Business School UK Specialist Masters Degree Program in Information Systems Management.

We now present a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you live from The Open Group 2011 Conference in San Diego. We’re here the week of February 7, and we have assembled a distinguished panel to examine the expectation of new types of cloud models and perhaps cloud specialization requirements emerging quite soon.

By now, we’re all familiar with the taxonomy around public cloud, private cloud, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and my favorite, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but we thought we would do you all an additional service and examine, firstly, where these general types of cloud models are actually gaining use and allegiance, and we’ll look at vertical industries and types of companies that are leaping ahead with cloud, as we now define it. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Then, second, we’re going to look at why one-size-fits-all cloud services may not fit so well in a highly fragmented, customized, heterogeneous, and specialized IT world.

How much of cloud services that come with a true price benefit, and that’s usually at scale and cheap, will be able to replace what is actually on the ground in many complex and unique enterprise IT organizations?

What’s more, we’ll look at the need for cloud specialization, based on geographic and regional requirements, as well as based on the size of these user organizations, which of course can vary from 5 to 50,000 seats. Can a few types of cloud work for all of them?

Please join me now in welcoming our panel. Here to help us better understand the quest for “fit for purpose” cloud balance and to predict, at least for some time, the considerable mismatch between enterprise cloud wants and cloud provider offerings we’re here with Penelope Gordon, the cofounder of 1Plug Corporation, based in San Francisco. Welcome, Penelope.

Penelope Gordon: Thank you.

Gardner: We’re also here with Mark Skilton. He is the Director of Portfolio and Solutions in the Global Infrastructure Services with Capgemini in London. Thank you for coming, Mark.

Mark Skilton: Thank you.

Gardner: Ed Harrington joins us. He is the Principal Consultant in Virginia for the UK-based Architecting the Enterprise organization. Thank you, Ed.

Ed Harrington: Thank you.

Gardner: Tom Plunkett is joining us. He is a Senior Solution Consultant with Oracle in Huntsville, Alabama.

Tom Plunkett: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, we’re here with TJ Virdi. He is Computing Architect in the CAS IT System Architecture Group at Boeing based in Seattle. Welcome.

TJ Virdi: Thank you.

Gardner: Let me go first to you, Mark Skilton. One size fits all has rarely worked in IT. If it has, it has been limited in its scope and, most often, leads to an additional level of engagement to make it work with what’s already there. Why should cloud be any different?

Three areas

Skilton: Well, Dana, from personal experience, there are probably three areas of adaptation of cloud into businesses. For sure, there are horizontal common services to which, what you call, the homogeneous cloud solution could be applied common to a number of business units or operations across a market.

But, we’re starting to increasingly see the need for customization to meet vertical competitive needs of a company or the decisions within that large company. So, differentiation and business models are still there, they are still in platform cloud as they were in the pre-cloud era.

But, the key thing is that we’re seeing a different kind of potential that a business can do now with cloud — a more elastic, explosive expansion and contraction of a business model. We’re seeing fundamentally the operating model of the business growing, and the industry can change using cloud technology.

So, there are two things going on in the business and the technologies are changing because of the cloud.

Gardner: Well, for us to understand where it fits best, and perhaps not so good, is to look at where it’s already working. Ed, you talked about the federal government. They seem to be going like gangbusters in the cloud. Why so?

Harrington: Perceived cost savings, primarily. The (US) federal government has done some analysis. In particular, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done some considerable analysis on what they think they can save by going to, in their case, a public cloud model for email and collaboration services. They’ve issued a $6.7 million contract to Unisys as the systems integrator, with Google being the cloud services supplier.

So, the debate over the benefits of cloud, versus the risks associated with cloud, is still going on quite heatedly.

Gardner: How about some other verticals? Where is this working? We’ve seen in some pharma, health-care, and research environments, which have a lot of elasticity, it makes sense, given that they have very variable loads. Any other suggestions on where this works, Tom?

Plunkett: You mentioned variable workloads. Another place where we are seeing a lot of customers approach cloud is when they are starting a new project. Because then, they don’t have to migrate from the existing infrastructure. Instead everything is brand new. That’s the other place where we see a lot of customers looking at cloud, your greenfields.

Gardner: TJ, any verticals that you are aware of? What are you seeing that’s working now?

Virdi: It’s not probably related with any vertical market, but I think what we are really looking for speed to put new products into the market or evolve the products that we already have and how to optimize business operations, as well as reduce the cost. These may be parallel to any vertical industries, where all these things are probably going to be working as a cloud solution.

Gardner: We’ve heard the application of “core and context” to applications, but maybe there is an application of core and context to cloud computing, whereby there’s not so much core and lot more context. Is that what you’re saying so far?

Unstructured data

Virdi: In a sense, you would have to measure not only the structured documents or structured data, but unstructured data as well. How to measure and create a new product or solutions is the really cool things you would be looking for in the cloud. And, it has proved pretty easy to put a new solution into the market. So, speed is also the big thing in there.

Gardner: Penelope, use cases or verticals where this is working so far?

Gordon: One example in talking about core and context is when you look in retail. You can have two retailers like a Walmart or a Costco, where they’re competing in the same general space, but are differentiating in different areas.

Walmart is really differentiating on the supply chain, and so it’s not a good candidate for public cloud computing solutions. We did discuss it that might possibly be a candidate for private cloud computing.

But that’s really where they’re going to invest in the differentiating, as opposed to a Costco, where it makes more sense for them to invest in their relationship with their customers and their relationship with their employees. They’re going to put more emphasis on those business processes, and they might be more inclined to outsource some of the aspects of their supply chain.

A specific example within retail is pricing optimization. A lot of grocery stores need to do pricing optimization checks once a quarter, or perhaps once a year in some of their areas. It doesn’t makes sense for smaller grocery store chains to have that kind of IT capability in house. So, that’s a really great candidate, when you are looking at a particular vertical business process to outsource to a cloud provider who has specific industry domain expertise.

Gardner: So for small and medium businesses (SMBs) that would be more core for them than others.

Gordon: Right. That’s an example, though, where you’re talking about what I would say is a particular vertical business process. Then, you’re talking about a monetization strategy and then part of the provider, where they are looking more at a niche strategy, rather than a commodity, where they are doing a horizontal infrastructure platform.

Gardner: Ed, you had a thought?

Harrington: Yeah, and it’s along the SMB dimension. We’re seeing a lot of cloud uptake in the small businesses. I work for a 50-person company. We have one “sort of” IT person and we do virtually everything in the cloud. We’ve got people in Australia and Canada, here in the States, headquartered in the UK, and we use cloud services for virtually everything across that. I’m associated with a number of other small companies and we are seeing big uptake of cloud services.

Gardner: Allow me to be a little bit of a skeptic, because I’m seeing these reports from analyst firms on the tens of billions of dollars in potential cloud market share and double-digit growth rates for the next several years. Is this going to come from just peripheral application context activities, mostly SMBs? What about the core in the enterprises? Does anybody have an example of where cloud is being used in either of those?

Skilton: In the telecom sector, which is very IT intensive, I’m seeing the emergence of their core business of delivering service to a large end user or multiple end user channels, using what I call cloud brokering.

Front-end cloud

So, if where you’re going with your question is that, certainly in the telecom sector we’re seeing the emergence of front end cloud, customer relationship management (CRM) type systems and also sort of back-end content delivery engines using cloud.

The fundamental shift away from the service orientated architecture (SOA) era is that we’re seeing more business driven self-service, more deployment of services as a business model, which is a big difference of the shift of the cloud. Particularly in telco, we’re seeing almost an explosion in that particular sector.

Gordon: A lot of companies don’t even necessarily realize that they’re using cloud services, particularly when you talk about SaaS. There are a number of SaaS solutions that are becoming more and more ubiquitous. If you look at large enterprise company recruiting sites, often you will see Taleo down at the bottom. Taleo is a SaaS. So, that’s a cloud solution, but it’s just not thought necessarily of in that context.

Gardner: Right. Tom?

Plunkett: Another place we’re seeing a lot of growth with regards to private clouds is actually on the defense side. The Defense Department is looking at private clouds, but they also have to deal with this core and context issue. We’re in San Diego today. The requirements for a shipboard system are very different from the land-based systems.

Ships have to deal with narrow bandwidth and going disconnected. They also have to deal with coalition partners or perhaps they are providing humanitarian assistance and they are dealing even with organizations we wouldn’t normally consider military. So, they have to deal with lots of information, assurance issues, and have completely different governance concerns that we normally think about for public clouds.

Gardner: However, in the last year or two, the assumption has been that this is something that’s going to impact every enterprise, and everybody should get ready. Yet, I’m hearing mostly this creeping in through packaged applications on a on-demand basis, SMBs, greenfield organizations, perhaps where high elasticity is a requirement.

What would be necessary for these cloud providers to be able to bring more of the core applications the large enterprises are looking for? What’s the new set of requirements? As I pointed out, we have had a general category of SaaS and development, elasticity, a handful of infrastructure services. What’s the next set of requirements that’s going to make it palatable for these core activities and these large enterprises to start doing this? Let me start with you, Penelope.

Gordon: It’s an interesting question and it was something that we were discussing in a session yesterday afternoon. Here is a gentleman from a large telecommunications company, and from his perspective, trust was a big issue. To him, part of it was just an immaturity of the market, specifically talking about what the new style of cloud is and that branding. Some of the aspects of cloud have been around for quite some time.

Look at Linux adoption as an analogy. A lot of companies started adopting Linux, but it was for peripheral applications and peripheral services, some web services that weren’t business critical. It didn’t really get into the core enterprise until much later.

We’re seeing some of that with cloud. It’s just a much bigger issue with cloud, especially as you start looking at providers wanting to moving up the food chain and providing greater value. This means that they have to have more industry knowledge and that they have to have more specialization. It becomes more difficult for large enterprises to trust a vendor to have that kind of knowledge.

No governance

Another aspect of what came up in the afternoon is that, at this point, while we talk about public cloud specifically, it’s not the same as saying it’s a public utility. We talk about “public utility,” but there is no governance, at this point, to say, “Here is certification that these companies have been tested to meet certain delivery standards.” Until that exists, it’s going to be difficult for some enterprises to get over that trust issue.

Gardner: Assuming that the trust and security issues are worked out over time, that experience leads to action, it leads to trust, it leads to adoption, and we have already seen that with SaaS applications. We’ve certainly seen it with the federal government, as Ed pointed out earlier.

Let’s just put that aside as one of the requirements that’s already on the drawing board and that we probably can put a checkmark next to at some point. What’s next? What about customization? What about heterogeneity? What about some of these other issues that are typical in IT, Mark Skilton?

Skilton: One of the under-played areas is PaaS. We hear about lock-in of technology caused by the use of the cloud, either putting too much data in or doing customization of parameters and you lose the elastic features of that cloud.

As to your question about what do vendors or providers need to do more to help the customer use the cloud, the two things we’re seeing are: one, more of an appliance strategy, where they can buy modular capabilities, so the licensing issue, solutioning issue, is more contained. The client can look at it more in a modular appliance sort of way. Think of it as cloud in a box.

The second thing is that we need to be seeing is much more offering transition services, transformation services, to accelerate the use of the cloud in a safe way, and I think that’s something that we need to really push hard to do. There’s a great quote from a client, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey to the cloud that I need to see.”

Gardner: You mentioned PaaS. We haven’t seen too much yet with a full mature offering of the full continuum of PaaS to IaaS. That’s one where new application development activities and new integration activities would be built of, for, and by the cloud and coordinated between the dev and the ops, with the ops being any number of cloud models — on-premises, off-premises, co-lo, multi-tenancy, and so forth.

So what about that? Is that another requirement that there is continuity between the past and the infrastructure and deployment, Tom?

Plunkett: We’re getting there. PaaS is going to be a real requirement going forward, simply because that’s going to provide us the flexibility to reach some of those core applications that we were talking about before. The further you get away from the context, the more you’re focusing on what the business is really focused in on, and that’s going to be the core, which is going to require effective PaaS.

Gardner: TJ.

More regulatory

Virdi: I want to second that, but at the same time, we’re looking for more regulatory and other kind of licensing and configuration issues as well. Those also make it a little better to use the cloud. You don’t really have to buy, or you can go for the demand. You need to make your licenses a little bit better in such a way that you can just put the product or business solutions into the market, test the water, and then you can go further on that.

Gardner: Penelope, where do you see any benefit of having a coordinated or integrated platform and development test and deploy functions? Is that going to bring this to a more core usage in large enterprises?

Gordon: It depends. I see a lot more of the buying of cloud moving out to the non-IT line of business executives. If that accelerates, there is going to be less and less focus. Companies are really separating now what is differentiating and what is core to my business from the rest of it.

There’s going to be less emphasis on, “Let’s do our scale development on a platform level” and more, “Let’s really seek out those vendors that are going to enable us to effectively integrate, so we don’t have to do double entry of data between different solutions. Let’s look out for the solutions that allow us to apply the governance and that effectively let us tailor our experience with these solutions in a way that doesn’t impinge upon the provider’s ability to deliver in a cost effective fashion.”

That’s going to become much more important. So, a lot of the development onus is going to be on the providers, rather than on the actual buyers.

Gardner: Now, this is interesting. On one hand, we have non-IT people, business people, specifying, acquiring, and using cloud services. On the other hand we’re perhaps going to see more PaaS, the new application development, be it custom or more of a SaaS type of offering that’s brought in with a certain level of adjustment and integration. But, these are going off without necessarily any coordination. At some point, they are going to even come together. It’s inevitable, another “integrationness” perhaps.

Mark Skilton, is that what you see, that we have not just one cloud approach but multiple approaches and then some need to rationalize?

Skilton: There are two key points. There’s a missing architecture practice that needs to be there, which is a workers analysis, so that you design applications to fit specific infrastructure containers, and you’ve got a bridge between the the application service and the infrastructure service. There needs to be a piece of work by enterprise architects that starts to bring that together as a deliberate design for applications to be able to operate in the cloud, and the PaaS platform is a perfect environment.

The second thing is that there’s a lack of policy management in terms of technical governance, and because of the lack of understanding, there needs to be more of a matching exercise going on. The key thing is that that needs to evolve.

Part of the work we’re doing in The Open Group with the Cloud Computing Work Group is to develop new standards and methodologies that bridge those gaps between infrastructure, PaaS, platform development, and SaaS.

Gardner: Ed Harrington, you mentioned earlier that the role of the enterprise architect is going to benefit from cloud. Do you see what we just described in terms of dual tracks, multiple inception points, heterogeneity, perhaps overlap and redundancy? Is that where the enterprise architect flourishes?

Shadow IT

Harrington: I think we talked about line management IT getting involved in acquiring cloud services. If you think we’ve got this thing called “shadow IT” today, wait a few years. We’re going to have a huge problem with shadow IT.

From the architect’s perspective, there’s lot to be involved with and a lot to play with, as I said in my talk. There’s an awful lot of analysis to be done — what is the value that the cloud solution being proposed is going to be supplying to the organization in business terms, versus the risk associated with it? Enterprise architects deal with change, and that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about change, and change will inherently involve risk.

Gardner: TJ.

Virdi: All these business decisions are going to be coming upstream, and business executives need to be more aware about how cloud could be utilized as a delivery model. The enterprise architects and someone with a technical background needs to educate or drive them to make the right decisions and choose the proper solutions.

It has an impact how you want to use the cloud, as well as how you get out of it too, in case you want to move to different cloud vendors or providers. All those things come into play upstream rather than downstream.

Gardner: We all seem to be resigned to this world of, “Well, here we go again. We’re going to sit back and wait for all these different cloud things to happen. Then, we’ll come in, like the sheriff on the white horse, and try to rationalize.” Why not try to rationalize now before we get to that point? What could be done from an architecture standpoint to head off mass confusion around cloud? Let me start at one end and go down the other. Tom?

Plunkett: One word: governance. We talked about the importance of governance increasing as the IT industry went into SOA. Well, cloud is going to make it even more important. Governance throughout the lifecycle, not just at the end, not just at deployment, but from the very beginning.

Gardner: TJ.

Virdi: In addition to governance, you probably have to figure out how you want to plan to adapt to the cloud also. You don’t want to start as a Big Bang theory. You want to start in incremental steps, small steps, test out what you really want to do. If that works, then go do the other things after that.

Gardner: Penelope, how about following the money? Doesn’t where the money flows in and out of organizations tend to have a powerful impact on motivating people or getting them moving towards governance or not?

Gordon: I agree, and towards that end, it’s enterprise architects. Enterprise architects need to break out of the idea of focusing on how to address the boundary between IT and the business and talk to the business in business terms.

One way of doing that that I have seen as effective is to look at it from the standpoint of portfolio management. Where you were familiar with financial portfolio management, now you are looking at a service portfolio, as well as looking at your overall business and all of your business processes as a portfolio. How can you optimize at a macro level for your portfolio of all the investment decisions you’re making, and how the various processes and services are enabled? Then, it comes down to, as you said, a money issue.

Gardner: Perhaps one way to head off what we seem to think is an inevitable cloud chaos situation is to invoke more shared services, get people to consume services and think about how to pay for them along the way, regardless of where they come from and regardless of who specified them. So back to SOA, back to ITIL, back to the blocking and tackling that’s just good enterprise architecture. Anything to add to that, Mark?

Not more of the same

Skilton: I think it’s a mistake to just describe this as more of the same. ITIL, in my view, needs to change to take into account self-service dynamics. ITIL is kind of a provider service management process. It’s thing that you do to people. Cloud changes that direction to the other way, and I think that’s something that needs to be done.

Also, fundamentally the data center and network strategies need to be in place to adopt cloud. From my experience, the data center transformation or refurbishment strategies or next generation networks tend to be done as a separate exercise from the applications area. So a strong, strong recommendation from me would be to drive a clear cloud route map to your data center.

Gardner: So, perhaps a regulating effect on the self-selection of cloud services would be that the network isn’t designed for it and it’s not going to help.

Skilton: Exactly.

Gardner: That’s one way to govern your cloud. Ed Harrington, any other further thoughts on working towards a cloud future without the pitfalls?

Harrington: Again, the governance, certification of some sort. I’m not in favor of regulation, but I am in favor of some sort of third party certification of services that consumers can rely upon safely. But, I will go back to what I said earlier. It’s a combination of governance, treating the cloud services as services per se, and enterprise architecture.

Gardner: What about the notion that was brought up earlier about private clouds being an important on-ramp to this? If I were a public cloud provider, I would do my market research on what’s going on in the private clouds, because I think they are going to be incubators to what might then become hybrid and ultimately a full-fledged third-party public cloud providing assets and services.

What can we learn from looking at what’s going on with private cloud now, seemingly a lot of trying to reduce cost and energy consumption, but what does that tell us about what we should expect in the next few years? Again, let’s start with you, Tom.

Plunkett: What we’re seeing with private cloud is that it’s actually impacting governance, because one of the things that you look at with private cloud is chargeback between different internal customers. This is forcing these organizations to deal with complex money, business issues that they don’t really like to do.

Nowadays, it’s mostly vertical applications, where you’ve got one owner who is paying for everything. Now, we’re actually going back to, as we were talking about earlier, dealing with some of the tricky issues of SOA.

Gardner: TJ, private cloud as an incubator. What we should expect?

Securing your data

Virdi: Configuration and change management — how in the private cloud we are adapting to it and supporting different customer segments is really the key. This could be utilized in the public cloud too, as well as how you are really securing your information and data or your business knowledge. How you want to secure that is key, and that’s why the private cloud is there. If we can adapt to or mimic the same kind of controls in the public cloud, maybe we’ll have more adoptions in the public cloud too.

Gardner: Penelope, any thoughts on that, the private to public transition?

Gordon: I also look at it in a little different way. For example, in the U.S., you have the National Security Agency (NSA). For a lot of what you would think of as their non-differentiating processes, for example payroll, they can’t use ADP. They can’t use that SaaS for payroll, because they can’t allow the identities of their employees to become publicly known.

Anything that involves their employee data and all the rest of the information within the agency has to be kept within a private cloud. But, they’re actively looking at private cloud solutions for some of the other benefits of cloud.

In one sense, I look at it and say that private cloud adoption to me tells a provider that this is an area that’s not a candidate for a public-cloud solution. But, private clouds could also be another channel for public cloud providers to be able to better monetize what they’re doing, rather than just focusing on public cloud solutions.

Gardner: So, then, you’re saying this is a two-way street. Just as we could foresee someone architecting a good private cloud and then looking to take that out to someone else’s infrastructure, you’re saying there is a lot of public services that for regulatory or other reasons might then need to come back in and be privatized or kept within the walls. Interesting.

Mark Skilton, any thoughts on this public-private tension and/or benefit?

Skilton: I asked an IT service director the question about what was it like running a cloud service for the account. This is a guy who had previously been running hosting and management and with many years experience.

The surprising thing was that he was quite shocked that the disciplines that he previously had for escalating errors and doing planned maintenance, monitoring, billing and charging back to the customer fundamentally were changing, because it had to be done more in real time. You have to fix before it fails. You can’t just wait for it to fail. You have to have a much more disciplined approach to running a private cloud.

The lessons that we’re learning in running private clouds for our clients is the need to have a much more of a running-IT-as-a-business ethos and approach. We find that if customers try to do it themselves, either they may find that difficult, because they are used to buying that as a service, or they have to change their enterprise architecture and support service disciplines to operate the cloud.

Gardner: Perhaps yet another way to offset potential for cloud chaos in the future is to develop the core competencies within the private-cloud environment and do it sooner rather than later? This is where you can cut your teeth or get your chops, some number of metaphors come to mind, but this is something that sounds like a priority. Would you agree with that Ed, coming up with a private-cloud capability is important?

Harrington: It’s important, and it’s probably going to dominate for the foreseeable future, especially in areas that organizations view as core. They view them as core, because they believe they provide some sort of competitive advantage or, as Penelope was saying, security reasons. ADP’s a good idea. ADP could go into NSA and set up a private cloud using ADP and NSA. I think is a really good thing.

Trust a big issue

But, I also think that trust is still a big issue and it’s going to come down to trust. It’s going to take a lot of work to have anything that is perceived by a major organization as core and providing differentiation to move to other than a private cloud.

Gardner: TJ.

Virdi: Private clouds actually allow you to make more business modular. Your capability is going to be a little bit more modular and interoperability testing could happen in the private cloud. Then you can actually use those same kind of modular functions, utilize the public cloud, and work with other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors that really package this as new holistic solutions.

Gardner: Does anyone consider the impact of mergers and acquisitions on this? We’re seeing the economy pick up, at least in some markets, and we’re certainly seeing globalization, a very powerful trend with us still. We can probably assume, if you’re a big company, that you’re going to get bigger through some sort of merger and acquisition activity. Does a cloud strategy ameliorate the pain and suffering of integration in these business mergers, Tom?

Plunkett: Well, not to speak on behalf of Oracle, but we’ve gone through a few mergers and acquisitions recently, and I do believe that having a cloud environment internally helps quite a bit. Specifically, TJ made the earlier point about modularity. Well, when we’re looking at modules, they’re easier to integrate. It’s easier to recompose services, and all the benefits of SOA really.

Gardner: TJ, mergers and acquisitions in cloud.

Virdi: It really helps. At the same time, we were talking about legal and regulatory compliance stuff. EU and Japan require you to put the personally identifiable information (PII) in their geographical areas. Cloud could provide a way to manage those things without having the hosting where you have your own business.

Gardner: Penelope, any thoughts, or maybe even on a slightly different subject, of being able to grow rapidly vis-à-vis cloud experience and expertise and having architects that understand it?

Gordon: Some of this comes back to some of the discussions we were having about the extra discipline that comes into play, if you are going to effectively consume and provide cloud services, if you do become much more rigorous about your change management, your configuration management, and if you then apply that out to a larger process level.

So, if you define certain capabilities within the business in a much more modular fashion, then, when you go through that growth and add on people, you have documented procedures and processes. It’s much easier to bring someone in and say, “You’re going to be a product manager, and that job role is fungible across the business.”

That kind of thinking, the cloud constructs applied up at a business architecture level, enables a kind of business expansion that we are looking at.

Gardner: Mark Skilton, thoughts about being able to manage growth, mergers and acquisitions, even general business agility vis-à-vis more cloud capabilities.

Skilton: Right now, I’m involved in merging in a cloud company that we bought last year in May, and I would say yes and no. The no point is that I’m trying to bundle this service that we acquired in each product and with which we could add competitive advantage to the services that we are offering. I’ve had a problem with trying to bundle that into our existing portfolio. I’ve got to work out how they will fit and deploy in our own cloud. So, that’s still a complexity problem.

Faster launch

But, the upside is that I can bundle that service that we acquired, because we wanted to get that additional capability, and rewrite design techniques for cloud computing. We can then launch that bundle of new service faster into the market.

It’s kind of a mixed blessing with cloud. With our own cloud services, we acquire these new companies, but we still have the same IT integration problem to then exploit that capability we’ve acquired.

Gardner: That might be a perfect example of where cloud is or isn’t. When you run into the issue of complexity and integration, it doesn’t compute, so to speak.

Skilton: It’s not plug and play yet, unfortunately.

Gardner: Ed, what do you think about this growth opportunity, mergers and acquisitions, a good thing or bad thing?

Harrington: It’s a challenge. I think, as Mark presented it, it’s got two sides. It depends a lot on how close the organizations are, how close their service portfolios are, to what degree has each of the organizations adapted the cloud, and is that going to cause conflict as well. So I think there is potential.

Skilton: Each organization in the commercial sector can have different standards, and then you still have that interoperability problem that we have to translate to make it benefit, the post merger integration issue.

Gardner: We’ve been discussing the practical requirements of various cloud computing models, looking at core and context issues where cloud models would work, where they wouldn’t. And, we have been thinking about how we might want to head off the potential mixed bag of cloud models in our organizations and what we can do now to make the path better, but perhaps also make our organizations more agile, service oriented, and able to absorb things like rapid growth and mergers.

I’d like to thank you all for joining and certainly want to thank our guests. This is a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 2011 Conference in San Diego. We’re here the week of February 7, 2011. A big thank you now to Penelope Gordon, cofounder of 1Plug Corporation. Thanks.

What is the impact on Enterprise Architecture with the introduction of Cloud Computing and SaaS?

One word – ‘Serious’.

Here is my perspective.

On the first look, it may seem like Enterprise Architecture is irrelevant in a company if your complete IT is running on Cloud Computing, SaaS and outsourcing/offshoring. I was of the same opinion last year. However, it is not the case. In fact, the complexity is going to get multiplied.

We have moved from monolithic systems to client-server to tiered architectures. With SOA comes the truly distributed architecture. And with Cloud Computing and SaaS, we are moving to “Globally Decentralized/Distributed Architecture”.

With global distribution, we will be able to compose business processes out of services from SalesForce.com, Services running on Azure/Amazon and host the resulting composite in another cloud platform. Does that sound too cool and flexible! Of course. But it is also exponentially complex to manage in the long run!

Some of the challenges: What are the failure modes in these global composites? Can we optimize the attributes of those composites? How do we trace/troubleshoot, version control these composites? What are the foreseeable security threats in these global platforms?

Integration between these huge Clouds/SaaS platforms? – Welcome to the world of software-intensive, MassiveSystem of Systems!🙂

If the first-generation EA guided us in dealing with System of Systems within an Enterprise, the next generation EA should help us in addressing ‘Massive System of Systems’.

With this new complexity, not only Enterprise Architecture gets necessary, but becomes absolutely critical in the IT ecosystem.

Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Computing will be topics of discussion at The Open Group India Conference in Chennai (March 7), Hyderabad (March 9) and Pune (March 11). Join us for best practices and case studies in the areas of Enterprise Architecture, Security, Cloud Computing and Certification, presented by preeminent thought leaders in the industry.

Balasubramanian Somasundaram is an Enterprise Architect with Honeywell Technology Solutions Ltd, Bangalore, a division of Honeywell Inc, USA. Bala has been with Honeywell Technology Solutions for the past five years and contributed in several technology roles. His current responsibilities include Architecture/Technology Planning and Governance, Solution Architecture Definition for business-critical programs, and Technical oversight/Review for programs delivered from Honeywell IT India center. With more than 12 years of experience in the IT services industry, Bala has worked with variety of technologies with a focus on IT architecture practice. His current interests include Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Computing and Mobile Applications. He periodically writes about emerging technology trends that impact the Enterprise IT space on his blog. Bala holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from MKU University, India.